Improving Parallel FDTD Method Performance Using SSE Instructions

Abstract

Electromagnetic researchers are often faced with long execution time and therefore algorithmic and implementation-level optimization can dramatically increase the overall performance of electromagnetism simulation using FDTD method. In this paper, we focus on acceleration implementation of 3D parallel FDTD method by taking advantage of the extended instruction sets found in modern processors, in particular the SSE instruction set. We present a SSE version of 3D Parallel FDTD Method that results in a considerable 3x speedup.